Refusing erasure
Enabling wider possibilities (part 2)
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This is the second post in a series. Read the first one here.
Erasure is an excruciating form of violence in part because its potency is exponential – the impact is not only immediately devastating, but the cascading effect means generations to come are deprived of the humanizing experiences of preservation, record, and reverence for life worthy of history, artifact, reference, and memory. I care a lot about memory, about the cruelty of forced forgetting, and about the necessity of reclamation.
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There is a reason I grounded this series on Palestine/Israel in the longest arc of history currently known and affirmed through archaeological evidence. There is a dangerous and disabling kind of erasure that occurs when the story begins ~75-100 years ago for everyone involved, and anyone that insists on this orientation as the only or the best way to make sense of this moment participates in manipulating data, collapsing truth, and denying context. Historical erasure that emerges when the frame of reference is restricted serves subversive agendas, not liberatory ones.
Be wary of the reductive narrative, more than ever, as the proliferation of misinformation only becomes more insidious and sophisticated.
There is a certain amount of history I feel is important to be understood at a baseline level about Israel/Palestine to disrupt cycles of harm and actually participate in the stability and generativity of peace. There are truths in the unfolding of events in the Levant from antiquity to present-day that are essential in enabling high-integrity agency and protection from those seductive and mercurial winds of righteousness. What you’re seeing on social media right now is often coming from the biased lens of understandable trauma on all sides, the lens of urgency to rapidly digest and regurgitate sense-making information, or a tremendous amount of hateful opportunism, and all of that can be hard to piece through. My writing here is personal. It comes from my own initmate need to ground myself in trustworthy context, because the insanity of misinformation has my head and heart spinning.
One disclaimer: this history is not comprehensive. You would be reading a PhD dissertation or one of dozens of books that other people have done a much better job of writing if I tried to do that. If there’s a critical piece of information you want to elevate, I can’t wait to hear from you in the comments.
Alright, let’s go on.
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This story is not 75 years old.
And, Judaism is absolutely inseparable from the legacy and the fate of Palestine/Israel.
I’m going to quickly review some of the highlights from the last piece in this paragraph. As discussed, Israelites/Hebrews/Judeans are amongst the oldest documented populations in Canaan/the Levant, long before it was Palestine. Empires came and went and it was the relentless persecution of Jewish peoples upon our ancestral homelands that forced Judaism into a partial diaspora from those lands, though not entirely as Jews have consistently populated the Levant since antiquity. One early mass casualty on those lands was the Roman conquest, which renamed “Judea” into “Syria-Palestina” to erase the obvious Jewish connection to the region. Inhabitants of those lands became “Palestinians”, which included Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The region did not become Arabized until 7th century CE. Meanwhile, plenty of Jews had already fled to areas that were part of “Arabia” so Jews lived throughout Arab lands in relative safety as dhimmis, second class citizens protected as “People of the Book”.
In the 9th century CE, large Jewish communities were reestablished in Jerusalem and Tiberias, and in the 11th century, Jewish communities grew in Rafah, Gaza, Ashkelon, Jaffa, and Caesarea. The Crusaders massacred many Jews during the 12th century, but they recovered under the protection of the Muslim Arabs and often allied with them to resist Christian invasion, particularly in Haifa. Prominent rabbis established communities in Safed, Jerusalem, and elsewhere during the following 300 years.
This was a rocky time for Jews, but arguably a period of profound flourishing throughout the Middle East, yet Jews were not sovereign, had no land to themselves since pre-Roman times, nor were they governed by people who represented them.
Let’s fast forward a few centuries.
By 1915, approximately 83,000 Jews lived in Palestine among 590,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs and the dominant reality was one of continued peaceful coexistence.
The tide began to turn more prominently when the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917 and the British Mandate in 1920 (which created “Mandated Palestine”) and tectonic territorial shifts under British rule were imminent as the British promised to divide the region and create a Jewish state. The British proved to be mercurial, inconsistent, and inflammatory overseers of Mandated Palestine - no surprise - and played both sides of the dynamic in ways that must have been strategic to their interests but feel downright inept and clumsy in retrospect.
Pro-Jewish and Anti-Jewish sentiment coexisted in a counterbalancing effect with prominent voices of the time celebrating or castigating Jewish life in Palestine.
In 1919, Emir Faisal, son of Sherif Hussein, the leader of the Arab National movement signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Jewish National movement, during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference supporting the implementation of Balfour. It acknowledged the “racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people” and concluded that “the surest means of working out the consummation of their national aspirations is through the closest possible collaboration in the development of the Arab states and Palestine.” The Faisal-Weizmann agreement affirmed that Jewish and non-Jewish Arab aspirations were not mutually exclusive.
In 1921, a delegation of Palestinians travelled to London in 1921 to protest the Balfour Declaration and reject the promise of a Jewish state, but a significant counterpoint was offered in July 1921, when Hasan Shukri, the mayor of Haifa and president of the Muslim National Associations, sent a telegram to the British government in reaction to this delegation and in support of the declaration:
“We strongly protest against the attitude of the said delegation concerning the Zionist question. We do not consider the Jewish people as an enemy whose wish is to crush us. On the contrary. We consider the Jews as a brotherly people sharing our joys and troubles and helping us in the construction of our common country. We are certain that without Jewish immigration and financial assistance there will be no future development of our country as may be judged from the fact that the towns inhabited in part by Jews such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, and Tiberias are making steady progress while Nablus, Acre, and Nazareth where no Jews reside are steadily declining.”
Swaying the other direction in the same year, despite authorizing Jewish sovereignty, the British appointed a fierce anti-Jewish Palestinian nationalist, Hadj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He used this position to promote Islam while rallying Arab nationalism against Zionism, and then went on to collaborate with Hitler.1 Though Palestinian nationalist resistance was to Zionism, violence was enacted against Jews who had existed in Palestine for thousands of years, such as in the ancient city of Hebron where a small community of 800 Jews had lived in peace with their tens of thousands of Arab neighbors since time immemorial. In 1929 al-Husseini amplified Arab hatred by stating that the Jews had placed Arab mosques and other holy Muslim sites in danger in an effort to deny Muslims the right to pray at the Western Wall. 67 Jews were murdered in Hebron, homes were pillaged and synagogues burned. This was followed shortly by the Safed Massacre where dozens more Jews were murdered, sending shockwaves through Jewish communities in Palestine, leading to the organization and development of the Jewish paramilitary organization, the Haganah, which later became the Israel Defense Forces.
In 1935, the Irgun, a Zionist underground military organization, split off from the Haganah. During the Arab Revolt from 1936-1939, Muslim Palestinian Arabs amped up their efforts in the fight for the end of the British Mandate and the creation of an Arab state strictly for Palestine. Irgun militants began bombing Palestinian Arab civilian targets in 1938. The Arab revolt was dismantled by the British in 1939 and as a conciliation to the Arabs, they issued the White Paper of 1939 which closed the doors to Jews fleeing from the Holocaust, guaranteed that an independent Arab state would be created within ten years, and that Jewish immigration would be limited to 75,000 for the next five years, after which it was to cease altogether, contradicting the Balfour Declaration which promised to create and foster a Jewish national home in Palestine.
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“The resources of the country are still virgin soil and will be developed by the Jewish immigrants. One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering over the high seas in every direction. His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though his ancestors had lived on it for 1000 years. At the same time, we have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine from Russia, Germany, Austria, Spain, [and] America. The cause of causes could not escape those who had a gift of deeper insight. They knew that the country was for its original sons (abna’ihi-l-asliyin), for all their differences, a sacred and beloved homeland. The return of these exiles (jaliya) to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually [to be] an experimental school for their brethren who are with them in the fields, factories, trades, and in all things connected with toil and labor.”
- Sherif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic Holy Places in Arabia
I’ll pause here to touch on a broader theme that is circulating in this moment: whose land is it? Didn’t Ashkenazi Jews invade Palestine and steal Palestinian land? Didn’t Jews create hardship for Palestinians?
About 80% of the Palestinian Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads, and Bedouins (see quote above). Indeed, Jewish immigration was seen as a boost to the region because they specifically relocated to uncultivated, swampy, and cheap land, and were able to transform those infertile soils into prolific farms. Jewish migrants from Europe chronically overpaid for the land sold to them by native Palestinians.2 Many Arabs were willing to sell to migrate to more fertile lands near coastal towns where they could invest in the citrus industry.3 Jews and Arabs both owned citrus orchards and by 1939, these orchards covered 75,000 acres, employed over 100,000 workers, and their produce was a primary export. During World War II (1939–1945) citrus-growing declined, and Arab-owned orange production overtook Jewish-owned production.
There’s much to say about land stewardship, ownership, transfer, etc, perhaps another time.
Ok, back to it.
It wasn’t until 1946, that Jews could begin migrating to Palestine again when President Truman urged the British government to relieve the suffering of Jews confined to displaced persons camps in Europe by immediately accepting 100,000 Jewish immigrants. Yet the Jewish population was severely restricted to just one third of the total.
In 1947, before the British Mandate was set to expire, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was created which divided the territory into an Arab state (42%), a Jewish state (56%), and the Special International Regime encompassing the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem (2%). Jews were allotted land in the northern part of the country, the Galilee, and the large, arid Negev Desert in the south. The remainder was to form the Arab state. Though approximately 60% of the Jewish state was to be the desert in the Negev, while the Arabs occupied most of the agricultural land, the plan was celebrated by most Jews in Palestine. It was outright rejected by the Arab Higher Committee, the Arab League, and other Arab leaders and governments which indicated an unwillingness to accept any form of territorial division. Subsequently, the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine broke out, which escalated into the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
“All our efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Palestine problem have failed. The only way left for us is war. I will have the pleasure and honor to save Palestine.”
Transjordan’s King Abdullah, April 26, 1948
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“We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return.”
David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948
I’ll pause here. There is so much to unpack in the history I just sped through, in the complex realities of the 1948 War itself, and its aftermath – from the horrors of the Nakba to the 1967 Six-Day War where 5 Arab nations conspired to erase Israel off the map, to the suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks in the 90’s, to the current decimation of Gaza and the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank. There is also much to be said about the courageous commitments to solidarity and peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis that persist against all odds. There is much to interrogate about Israel as a nation and the devolution of its government, further and further right, to a modern expression of oppressive possession, increasing authoritarianism, and wide-scale repression of millions of Palestinian civilians. There is much to be said about the broader evolution of complex, global, geopolitical realities that soon brought the US into the picture with its disastrous interventions throughout the Middle East, acting as another coercive, destabilizing, imperial force on the heels of the British.
But I am going to pause here and zoom out.
As I sit with this history, it only affirms for me that the most dominant story in the region for thousands of years was one of peaceful coexistence on shared ancestral homelands, until quite quickly, in a matter of decades, it wasn’t, and the realities around that are complex, fraught with foreign intervention, and not easily summarized.
It makes me wonder what would have been possible for Jews and Palestinians without the intervention of the British empire that amplified nationalistic forces and exacerbated tensions between the two. It makes me wonder about the prolonged implications to this day of increasingly sophisticated manifestations of warfare, the amassing of nuclear weapons, the acceleration of existential threats to humanity throughout the 20th and 21st centuries that can’t simply be ignored nor can the burden disproportionately placed upon Israel. It makes me wonder about the ways Palestinians and Israelis have suffered under the leadership of men who will settle for nothing less than total domination, that repeatedly undermine the pursuit of peaceful coexistence through a refusal to compromise. It makes me wonder about the immense pressures to conform to nationalism as a necessary form of defense and protection within the culture-annihilating contexts of colonialism that were foreign to both of us. It makes me wonder about how we have no control over the most deranged, narcissistic leaders world-over. We are backed into corners asking for mercy from men with rockets at their fingertips who would sooner dance on the corpses of children, women, and elders for the soul-extinguishing seductions of power, control, and greed.
I stay connected to common humanity and shared struggle, which calls us to ask more of ourselves and of humanity, to live into the highest expressions possible that emphatically resist all forms of retaliation, to conjure more sophisticated technologies than the “nation-state” and endless warfare to defend our right to exist, to ensure appropriate accountability for the very few men who are inflaming polarization for personal gain.
How might we scale possibilities for de-escalation of violence and de-programming of indoctrination? Luckily there are many who can show us the way from the most ferocious forms of indoctrinated blood lust back into the rentlessly rehumanizing bonds of brotherhood.
Judaism is absolutely inseparable from Palestine/Israel.
Our fates are bound together. Palestinian and Jewish liberation are interdependent.
Palestinian freedom is imperative for peace.
And half of the world’s Jewish population lives in Israel.
To care about Jewish people is to care about the safety of Jewish people in Israel/Palestine and the right to our self-determination. To care about Palestinians is to care about the exact same things. To care about Palestinians is to care about Jews, and to care about Jews is to care about Palestinians.
Jewish-supremacist nationalism and Palestinian/Muslim-supremacist nationalism are two violently inflamed ideologies that should not be amplified by the masses as we see so easily in global protests that sweep the world. It is of utmost importance that we see extremism from the Islamic Republic/Hamas and Netanyahu/the Likud party as dueling equals. Equally destructive. Equally toxic. While we simultaneously hold that the impunity the increasingly far right Israeli government has been held is a suicide mission for Jews as it is a homicide mission for Palestinians, the occupation must be ended, and reparations must be made.
Our history prescribes peaceful coexistence, and it is not so distant that we were once capable of truly seeing the benefits of integration.
50% of the world’s Jews live in Israel. Jews are inseparable from those lands, historically and presently. While we can and should honor that colonial forms of Zionism should not be conflated with Judaism, we cannot erase how integral Israel is for Jews and Judaism. As a Jewish person, I am called into this moment to serve the highest expression of my culture and faith to repair the wrongdoings of the far right, hold a supreme moral standard, restore the world’s faith in us, and embody the true heart of Judaism with honor. And for those who are not as proximate to this conflict, my continued request and prayer is for a commitment to trusting in our right to peaceful coexistence – Palestinians and Jews and Israelis – to continue building the paths of justice and solidarity together, excluding no one, holding no one beyond reproach, reducing no one, abiding by no stereotypes or biased representations of any of our peoples, choosing no sides.
We are in this together.
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This substack will always remain free, but your subscriptions and financial support make that even more possible to pour into this devotion. You can pay what you can to honor any benefit you gain from this place through venmo.
Hajj Amin al-Husayni: Wartime Propagandist". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War, (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 32.
Porath, 80, 84; See also Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
Imagine... Imagine a better, brighter future. It doesn’t have to be like this. Thank you for your research and clarity. The enormity of this horror overwhelms me at times. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Thank you for this, Rachel. Your commitment to truth, nuance, culture and coexistence is a rare gem in these times.